Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) is an editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times and the author of “(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump,” from which this essay was adapted.

Anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise, up 57 percent in 2017 from 2016, the largest single-year jump on record, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Of course, as you recall, many of them were hate hoaxes perpetrated by that Jewish guy in Israel, the black leftist journalist, and who knows how many more hoaxers? But how can anybody expect New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman to remember all the way back to 2017?

I have personally seen the anti-Semitism, in online insults, threatening voice mail messages and the occasional email that makes it through my spam filter.

I think a fair amount of the agitation of elite journalists comes from their largely committing to Twitter a half decade ago. The seemingly minor differences in how Twitter worked from how email, comments, discussion groups and so forth had operated led to a huge growth in ethnic paranoia among their ranks, as the title of Weisman’s book suggests. (I’ll try to flesh this theory out more when Weisman’s book arrives.)

If not quite a crisis, it feels like a proto-crisis, something to head off, especially when the rise of anti-Semitism is combined with hate crimes against Muslims, blacks, Hispanics and immigrants. Yet American Jewish leaders — the heads of influential, established organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations of North America — have been remarkably quiet, focused instead, as they have been for decades, on Israel, not the brewing storm in our own country.

But American Jews need to assert a voice in the public arena, to reshape our quiescent institutions and mold them in our image. And Jewish leadership must reflect its congregants, who are not sheep.

When the Anti-Defamation League, a century-old institution founded to combat anti-Semitism, released its guide to the “Alt Right and Alt Lite” last year, Ohio’s Republican state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who is Jewish, actually expressed support for two of the people on the list: Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, conservative provocateurs who have found notoriety in the Trump era. …

For drawing attention to these men, the Anti-Defamation League was tarred as a partisan organization by an elected Jewish Republican. …

Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. At the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted attack — and it is not being defended. And so far, nothing else has arisen to forcefully take a stand in the Jewish fight against bigotry. …

Truth must also be defended, which is what groups like the league and the Southern Poverty Law Center try to do as they expose hate. …

For Jews, this is personal. Had ordinary Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Austrians and Frenchmen not played along, had they continued to shop in Jewish establishments and visit Jewish doctors, the Final Solution may, just may, not have been quite so final. …

Why can’t the domestic apparatus of the American Jewish Committee reconstitute itself at the request of Jewish donors and members, and the Anti-Defamation League assert itself, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, in the arena of bigotry without fear of being charged with partisanship?

In the early 1930s, as Hitler …

iSteve commenter Anonym notes:

Help! The poor, defenseless Anti-Defamation League is being defamed! There needs to be some sort of organization, maybe a League, to defend the ADL. An ADL for the ADL. That’s a great idea.

But hey, what if the ADL for the ADL comes under attack by virulent anti-Semites? The only foolproof solution is an ADL for the ADL for the ADL.